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A prophet looking into a curved universe<\/em><\/p>\n One of the more curious asides in modern revelation is D&C 121 when God tells Joseph that he was living in a time \u201c<\/span>Which our forefathers have awaited with <\/span>anxious<\/span> expectation.\u201d When all sorts of truths would finally be revealed:<\/span><\/p>\n And also, if there be <\/span><\/i>bounds<\/span><\/i> set to the heavens or to the seas, or to the dry land, or to the sun, moon, or stars\u2014All the times of their revolutions, all the appointed days, months, and years, and all the days of their days, months, and years, and all their <\/span><\/i>glories<\/span><\/i>, laws, and set times, shall be revealed in the days of the <\/span><\/i>dispensation<\/span><\/i> of the fulness of times<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n This revelation is all the more curious because it comes as a seeming non-sequitur in the middle of Joseph\u2019s famous dirge about suffering. It\u2019s almost like God was situating the immediate events in their proper context. Yes, you are suffering in a dank prison in a small town in Missouri for \u201cbut a small moment,\u201d but the universe and gospel is so grand and I will reveal a piece of that to you.\u00a0 <\/span>D&C 121 threads the needle more than almost any other document I\u2019ve read between placing suffering in its proper context, almost downplaying it relative to the glories beyond, while seamlessly lifting up and fortifying Joseph in the process. It\u2019s the ultimate football coach telling him to walk it off because he believes in him.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I\u2019d wager the default assumption most people bring to this text is that the things mentioned will be revealed via standard revelation, and given that it\u2019s in D&C 121 and the fact that included in the list is a series of things that could only be revealed through direct religious means (\u201cwhether there be <\/span>one God<\/span> or many <\/span>gods<\/span>\u201d) that\u2019s a warranted assumption. However, given that some of these things are very much discoverable through modern-day scientific means I actually assume that this is one of those cases where our own distinction between religious revelation and scientific discovery becomes artificial as everything is collapsed into one great whole, or as Brigham Young said <\/span>\u201cif an Elder shall give us a lecture upon astronomy, chemistry, or geology, our religion embraces it all. \u2026 The truth that is in all the arts and sciences forms part of our religion. Faith is no more a part of it than any other true principle of philosophy.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n So I see modern-day scientific discoveries as fulfilling this prophecy, and given the subject matter that is also a warranted take. So where are we on these questions? \u00a0<\/span>\u201cAll the times of their revolutions\u201d has been more or less fulfilled with instruments like the Kepler telescope, TESS and James Webb as we have catalogued the positions and characteristics of stars and their planets.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n What about \u201cbounds set to the heavens\u201d? Or does it go on forever? The question of whether space is bounded, or in other words what the \u201cshape\u201d of space is is an old one. Is space \u201cflat\u201d in a 3-dimensional sense and infinite, so in a sense we can continue to move through it forever? Or are we positively curved like a ball, so in theory a rocket ship could end up in the same place where it started by moving forward in a straight line (ignoring the effects of an expanding universe)?\u00a0 But wait, we might also be what\u2019s called a torus, where space is<\/span> flat and bounded <\/span><\/i>like a game of space invaders, but once you get to the edge of the screen you pop right back up on the other side.\u00a0<\/span>Space could also be negatively cured like a saddle. Or maybe we are in a universe that occasionally\u00a0 interacts with other universes.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The last possibility is untestable right now, but the shape of the universe is not. On this we are making some progress, but like a lot of physics we are having success in terms of coming up with narrower and narrower possibilities. Using satellites and high altitude balloons we\u2019ve looked at the early light from the Big Bang to that suffuses the universe in order to test whether a curved universe is shaping it, and as far as we can tell it is not, so it is flat to within a few percentage points. However, it might be a case that the curve is too small for us to detect with current instruments, like trying to see an atom in a Wal-Mart microscope, and one preprint that I can\u2019t begin to understand is claiming to find evidence that <\/span>it could be negatively curved<\/span><\/a>, but it\u2019s also possible to interpret the data in favor of a slight <\/span>positively curved universe<\/span><\/a>, while the consensus is still that the universe is flat.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Testing whether the universe ends<\/em> is also difficult, but it typically takes the form of looking for matching patterns in the sky since in theory if the universe was closed and looped back on itself you could see the same object from different angles in the same sky. So far we haven\u2019t detected anything, so if it is closed it is so large that we don\u2019t see anything repeat in the observable universe.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n